


The Problem

by lwssrnsm



Category: Lego Ninjago
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:34:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27020590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lwssrnsm/pseuds/lwssrnsm
Summary: A very brief one-shot describing Dr. Julien's turmoil over granting Zane one very specific human ability. May become a longer work later on. Please review!
Relationships: zane & dr. julien
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	The Problem

The debate hadn’t ended for Julien, even though Zane was laying on the building table, powered down, chest open, cables and computers and gears and ever scrolling lines of code and the soft blue glow of heart against silver and black that were already far more than robot. Julien knew - or mostly knew - the what, where, and why of each piece, but the complexities of his work were constantly teetering on the fall into chaos and still, they felt more orderly than his own mind. This particular project always did that to him. It had started as a curiosity, an almost-Frankenstein how-far-can-this-really-go; a purely theoretical question about how human his robot could actually be. But the more he thought about it, the more it felt necessary. Even essential. How would his robot become his son without it? It was undeniably a central, steering, defining part of the human experience. So theory became tinkering. And then tinkering became experimenting. And somewhere, it became obsession and he was pouring hundreds and hundreds - by now it was certainly thousands - of hours into this one aspect of Zane. It was undoubtedly the most difficult undertaking in all the building he’d done - three weeks of piecing together impossibly precise finger joints - over a month of molding every kind of metal he knew in every combination and every thickness and every temperature until it started to feel like skin - the years of writing and tweaking and erasing and reconstructing the most advanced mechanical intelligence (it really couldn’t be called artificial anymore) system in the world - all of it seemed a lot paler now. And a lot easier, because on this one he didn’t even know where to start, and then once he did, he thought of forty starting places at once and he had to work through all of them methodically while nothing worked and his obsession grew. 

But the other parts of Zane were falling into place, and suddenly he was starting to perform tests on a walking, talking, breathing, feeling titanium robot. Julien had always loved him, but now that he developed Zane’s intelligence by having conversations with him instead of tinkering with processing discs and they could literally laugh together over Zane’s stumbling as he learned to walk and then run, all those places where his love had been tainted by a science-love or a knowledge-love were suddenly washed away. All at once, his love was more than tainted with an overwhelming fatherly pride and adoration and he began to live for the hours where Zane was awake. He discovered that being a father was far greater than being an inventor, and crouching above powered-down Zane where he tinkered and improved and adjusted became just the spaces in between his passion.

So it was unavoidable that just when he started to make progress on that hardest problem of all, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to. Of course he kept working towards making it a reality - he was so much scientist that emotional turmoil wasn’t enough to halt that kind of obsession. And there was a moral drive behind it, too, somehow knowing that if he succeeded in this, it would make his son better even if he hated the implications of it. So in those spaces in between, the inventor kept creeping closer to the answer while the father cried against it, until all of a sudden the inventor was calling it cruel experimentation while the father called it necessary - even beautiful - humanity and then pendulum and it was revolutionary science but unthinkable harm to his boy, his love, his son. And every time he opened Zane’s body on the table like this, both sides of Julien felt less and less orderly and more and more anguish-chaos-debate. But it was coming to him now, falling into place, hours and hours of working and he wasn’t sure whether the father or the inventor was winning because he wasn’t sure what side each was on, and then it was done. No test run, no beta, no version one, because there couldn’t be. However this worked, it would stay a part of Zane forever - but it would work, perfectly, because he’d never spent so much time to be so sure. He integrated the solution into Zane’s intelligence, and all the corresponding triggers in his physical operations, and all that was left to do was close the chest panel and lift the sleep hold and wait and see what happened to his son. 

Zane’s eyes flickered on, and instantly his relaxed face contorted into an expression Julien had never seen, confusion and turmoil with a brand new depth and desperation. 

“Father?”

Zane’s voice was so full of it. An unprecedented success, and it broke Julien. His heart turned in agony. Hot tears started chasing down his cheeks, and he ungracefully climbed onto the table and gathered his son into a tight, awkward, desperate hug. Zane welcomed the embrace, buried his head in his father’s shirt, and joined him in crying as Julien tried desperately to find the words to explain what he had done...

“Zane. Zane, my beautiful, beautiful boy-“ his tears were choking him “-this is called pain.”

**Author's Note:**

> *inspired by Leonardo_Charles_Bluewood_21, thank you friend


End file.
